Throughout the novel, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass provides a powerful insight to the world of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. After Douglass escaped the reigns of slavery, he became an anti-slavery advocate, educator, politician, and renowned public speaker, traveling abroad and sharing his story, eventually publishing an autobiography in 1845. Douglass makes a firm argument against slavery, emotionally affecting the reader while presenting himself as an ethical, compassionate, and resourceful individual. Through the whole of the narrative, Douglass uses strong vocabulary to give readers strong feelings of hope, anger, and sympathy. “He would whip her to make her scream, and whip her to make her …show more content…
hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin” (Douglass 5).
In this passage, Douglass witnessed his aunt beaten and whipped relentlessly by a barbaric slaveholder by the name of ‘Captain’ Anthony. “It is possible, and even quite probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed from that plantation to Baltimore, I should have to-day, instead of being here seated by my own table, in the enjoyment of freedom and the happiness of home, writing this Narrative, been confined in the galling chains of slavery” (Douglass 27). As Douglass is removed from Colonel Lloyd’s plantation, he realizes that even the simple act of being moved to Baltimore laid the foundation of his hope of escaping from slavery. “The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the wound” (Douglass 59). After being beaten severely by Mr. Covey, Douglass attempts to escape to his master’s home, detailing his journey through the wooded forest in great detail, how he bled so profusely from his head. “With that, he strove to drag me to a stick that was lying just out of the stable door. He meant to knock me down. But just as he was leaning over to get the stick, I
seized him with both hands by his collar, and brought him by a sudden snatch to the ground” (Douglass 62). When Douglass returned to Mr. Covey’s home, a brawl ensued between the two. After the clash, Covey never contends with Douglass again, leaving the rest of the time relatively peaceful. Douglass uses strong vocabulary such as “snatch”, “blood-clotted”, and “oozing” to evict sympathy, anger, and sadness from the audience. By using powerful jargon, he increases his influence on the audience, making readers feel strongly about his argument against slavery. Along with using high-level vocabulary to emotionally appeal to the reader, Douglass presents himself as an ethical, intelligent, compassionate and resourceful person to establish his credibility as an author, helping to convince the audience of his argument. “I may be deemed superstitious, and even egotistical, in regarding this event as a special interposition of divine Providence in my favor. But I should be false to the earliest sentiments of my soul, if I suppressed the opinion. I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur my own abhorrence” (Douglass 27).
In The book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass writes about how a slavemaster Mr.Covey attacks one of his slaves with a long rope catching him by his legs for no reason. This shows unpredictable his slave master is when he decided to try and punish him for whatever reason he think is a good one. Because of this, slaves were held back and lived in fear all the time. We see, though, that Douglass decides to take control of his life. Douglass want the reader to understand the control that fear had and admire the willingness of slaves to take chances for their freedom.
The hopeful and then helpless tones in Douglass' passage reflect his inner turmoil throughout the process of his escape from the wretched south. At first, Frederick Douglass feels the utter feeling of happiness covering every inch of his body and soul. However, he soon finds out that the rosy path has thorns that dug into his skin as freedom was dangled in front of his face through a tunnel of complete darkness.
Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, about the devastation associated with slavery and the destruction from which comes desperation. Douglass intends to summon upon the guilt and empathy of his white audience by giving an account from which the reader is able to coax up a new perspective on the dreadful oppression. Seen especially in the third paragraph where Douglass provides a series of rhetorical devices including: apostrophe, anaphora, personification, exemplum, and epithet in his sorrowful bellowing to passing ships.
Frederick Douglass, an African American social reformer who escaped from slavery, in his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” denotes the perilous life of a slave in the South. Through syntax, Douglass is able to persuade his readers to support the abolitionist movement as his writing transitions from shifting sentence lengths to parallel structure and finally to varying uses of punctuation. Douglass begins his memoir with a combination of long and short sentences that serve to effectively depict life his life as a slave. This depiction is significant because it illustrates the treatment of slaves in the south allows his audience to despise the horrors of slavery. In addition, this
A staunch abolitionist, Douglass would take the country by storm through the power of his words and writings. His narrative was unique in regards to how it was written and the content it holds. Unlike most biographies of freed slaves, Douglass would write his own story and with his own words. His narrative would attempt to understand the effects slavery was having on not just the slaves, but the slaveholders as well. The success of his biography, however, did not rest on the amount of horror in it but from the unmistakable authenticity it provided. His narrative would compel his readers to take action with graphic accounts of the lashes slaves would receive as punishment, “the loude...
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a slave narrative published in 1845, Frederick Douglass divulged his past as a slave and presented a multifaceted argument against slavery in the United States. Douglass built his argument with endless anecdotes and colorful figurative language. He attempted to familiarize the naïve Northerners with the hardships of slavery and negate any misconstrued ideas that would prolong slavery’s existence in American homes. Particularly in chapter seven, Douglass both narrated his personal experience of learning to write and identified the benefits and consequences of being an educated slave.
Douglass, Frederick. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave: Written by Himself (ed. John Blassingame) Yale University Press, 2001.
In conclusion, Frederick Douglass starts his life as a slave determined to get his freedom. At the end of his life, he is one of the foremost figures of the abolitionist movement. Douglass' narrative takes advantage of the literal advantage in order to abolish slavery. Through depictions of dehumanization and freedom, Frederick Douglass' narrative is instrumental in swaying the views of the indifferent Northern residents.
Douglass appeals to pathos in his narrative through many quotes and traumatic events that he experienced. He states, “I was afraid to speak to anyone for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for their prey” (Douglass 113). By creating such an analogy, Douglass provokes guilty and sympathetic emotion from his readers. He’s saying that he doesn’t even know who he can and cannot trust, because slavery changes everyone’s personas and
In this narrative, Douglass describes his life as a slave in ways that is brutalizing and dehumanizing. He wants his readers to understand that concept. By doing this, Douglass writes, “I was seized with a violent aching of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb” (416). Douglass uses diction such as seized, aching, extreme dizziness, and trembled to help create a picture of the pain he had felt during his experiences of being a slave for Mr. Covey. Another example is when he writes, “I told him as well as I could, for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in the side, and told me to get up I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but stooping to get the tub with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and fell” (416-17). Words like scarce, savage, and staggered place imagery into the reader’s minds of what he went through as a slave. One other way that Douglass shows how his words emphasize the message is when he writes, “The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the w...
America in the mid to early nineteenth century saw the torture of many African Americans in slavery. Plantation owners did not care whether they were young or old, girl or boy, to them all slaves were there to work. One slave in particular, Frederick Douglass, documented his journey through slavery in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through the use of various rhetorical devices and strategies, Douglass conveys the dehumanizing and corrupting effect of slavery, in order to show the overall need for American abolition. His use of devices such as parallelism, asyndeton, simile, antithesis, juxtaposition and use of irony, not only establish ethos but also show the negative effects of slavery on slaves, masters and
Slavery consisted of numerous inhumane horrors completed to make its victims feel desolated and helpless. Many of these horrors of slavery are conveyed in the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The entire prospect of the duration of the story is to plan an escape from the excruciating conditions awaiting Douglass as a slave. When his escape is finally executed, unpredictable emotions and thoughts overwhelm him. Within the conclusion of his narrative (shown in the given passage), Frederick Douglass uses figurative language, diction, and syntax to portray such states of mind he felt after escaping slavery: relief, loneliness, and paranoia.
The tone established in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is unusual in that from the beginning to the end the focus has been shifted. In the beginning of the narrative Douglass seems to fulfill every stereotypical slavery theme. He is a young black slave who at first cannot read and is very naïve in understanding his situation. As a child put into slavery Douglass does not have the knowledge to know about his surroundings and the world outside of slavery. In Douglass’ narrative the tone is first set as that of an observer, however finishing with his own personal accounts.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
The reader is first introduced to the idea of Douglass’s formation of identity outside the constraints of slavery before he or she even begins reading the narrative. By viewing the title page and reading the words “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself” the reader sees the advancement Douglass made from a dependent slave to an independent author (Stone 134). As a slave, he was forbidden a voice with which he might speak out against slavery. Furthermore, the traditional roles of slavery would have had him uneducated—unable to read and incapable of writing. However, by examining the full meaning of the title page, the reader is introduced to Douglass’s refusal to adhere to the slave role of uneducated and voiceless. Thus, even before reading the work, the reader knows that Douglass will show “how a slave was made a man” through “speaking out—the symbolic act of self-definition” (Stone 135).